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However all fi ve photographers were members of the
newly-founded Société héliographique, and several
other members of that Society were government func-
tionaries with some connection to the Commission des
Monuments historiques, notably Léon de Laborde, who
was a member of both bodies. Thus it appears that the
Société héliographique was somehow involved in devel-
oping or at least encouraging the photographic missions.
But the Society and the Commission had different objec-
tives. The Commission devised the survey to document
structures that were slated for government-sponsored
restoration, so the buildings chosen were not necessarily
the chief monuments of their respective cities. Moreover
a number of the photographs, such as “Dolmen de Ba-
gneux près Saumur” by Le Gray and Mestral, seem to
refl ect the particular enthusiasms of Prosper Mérimée,
director of the Commission, more than any institutional
imperative. Most of the regions of France are included
in the survey, indicating some interest in a representa-
tive collection of views. But the Commission acquired
only certain views made by the photographers: Le Secq,
Le Gray and Mestral all made many more photographs
than requested on their trips, but the extra work did not
interest the Commission. Much of Le Secq’s work has
survived; it is comprised almost entirely of building
views, and yet the Commission acquired only a por-
tion, for instance, of the 43 photographs he made of
Strasbourg Cathedral (his work not purchased by the
commission is now housed at the Bibliothèque des Arts
décoratifs in Paris). A photographic record for its own
sake was outside the Commission’s purview. The nega-
tives and prints it acquired were fi led in dossiers on the
respective buildings they represented. The Commission
never published or exhibited the photographs.
Such a photographic archive did not match the inter-
ests of the Société héliographique. The group’s objectives
were indicated as early as March 1851, when La Lumière
reported that the photographic missions had given impe-
tus to the Society’s desire to found a photographic pub-
lishing establishment. Evidently the members envisioned
printing views from the project for public dispersal. The
scope of the Society’s hopes for the missions is indicated
by Francis Wey’s 1853 reference to the projcet in his
essay “Comment le soleil est devenu peintre:”
...The public is deprived of these prints that everyone
would examine and discuss; the photographers are de-
nied the publicity they had hoped for, and our country
cannot honor the most beautiful body of work that has
been produced to date. We had asked for as much and
we had hoped for more.The photographs were in fact widely discussed in the
photographic press, where the distinctive approaches of
the photographers were noted. Baldus combined nega-
tives with amazing skill in several views, such as “Palais
des Papes et Notre-Dame-des-Doms” taken in Avignon.
In this and other images he typically depicted his sub-
ject from a distance, with the entire structure placed
centrally in the frame, giving it an air of monumentality.
Le Secq’s heroics were not on the order of combined
negatives or monumental views, but in climbing all over
and around a building to capture perspectives of rarely-
seen details. In views such as “Cathédrale, fl èche, angle
nord-est” taken at Strasbourg, he combined his rooftop
escapades with dynamic off-center compositions that
often vivify the sculpted fi gures. Le Gray and Mestral
frequently emphasized the graphic patterning of darks
and lights in the picture frame, making imaginative use
of the calotype’s blank skies. Their compositions give
the subjects a sense of grand scale and architectural
harmony, as seen in the view “Eglise, ensemble est”
taken at the church of Saint-Julien-de-Brioude. Despite
these creative prerogatives, the various processes the
photographers used all point to a desire for smooth
negative surfaces and optimal clarity, an obvious re-
quirement for architectural records. The fact that only
Bayard employed glass is not surprising: transport of
the negatives was precarious, and Niépce’s process was
very slow with uneven results. Along with the Mission
photographs themselves, Baldus’ subsequent production
of fi nely detailed calotype views points to the desire of
these photographers to make good architectural docu-
ments with the calotype process.
However hidden from view the Mission photographs
remained, they were part of a wide impulse to document
France’s architectural heritage. Baron Taylor’s Voyages
Pittoresques is frequently cited as a lithographic model
for the Mission héliographique, but the specifi c archival
requirements fulfi lled by the Mission mark its difference
from Taylor’s Romantic atlas. The use of photography
for such a project was untested in 1851, but it was not
without precedent. The Commission des Monuments
historiques had itself ordered six “daguerreotype views”
of unspecifi ed subjects from Bayard in 1849. As early
as 1843 the architect Felix Duban had hired Bayard to
make between 20 and 50 daguerreotypes of the château
at Blois for a restoration ordered by the Commission (a
handful of these are preserved at the Société française
de photographie). Closer to the sentiments of the Voy-
ages Pittoresques, Le Secq had privately undertaken
a photographic record of Amiens Cathedral in 1850.
These endeavors and the Mission itself demonstrated
that photography could serve both the public’s imagi-
native relationship to the past and the instrumental
needs of architects and committees. Throughout the
1850s photographers continued to record monuments
all over France. In 1852 Charles Nègre embarked on a
photographic tour of his native Provence, photographing